How Cisco is Powering the Future of Esports
A network is one of those things that only gets attention when it doesn't work right, when there are mass outages and everyone is frantically refreshing to try and get back online.
But that can sometimes obfuscate just how amazing the network can be. And during the 2020 League of Legends World Championships, the network may have been the biggest winner.
Because of COVID-19, production at Riot Games’ Worlds had to be rethought. The production crew couldn’t travel like it normally would have to the Final in Shanghai. Most of the production crew was instead spread throughout the world. This was truly a global, disparate production.
And given that esports relies on not having any latency or downtime, the network had to deliver. Any pause or interruption could have had massive implications. But for Cisco, the Official Enterprise Networking Partner of LoL Esports, this was no problem.
Not only was this year’s Worlds the most data-heavy ever at 3.2 petabytes—that’s more than three million gigabytes; your iPhone fills up at a pedestrian 512 GBs—but it was also the first to have no network-related pauses and zero packet losses or errors.
“We could’ve rested on our laurels because of COVID-19,” says Scott Adametz, Riot Games’ Head of Esports Technology. “We could’ve made the easier decision to scale down the show. But that’s not Riot. Our DNA is pushing the envelope, pushing ourselves to go forward. And we needed a tech platform like Cisco to do that.”
That meant producing a technically complex show. The competition happened in Shanghai, but production was done in Berlin and Los Angeles, along with other remote studios. During gameplay, more than 100 separate video streams were sent from China to the remote studios, where they were ingested and translated into 19 languages. In the first two days alone, Cisco’s network handled 200TB of traffic. Utilizing Cisco’s Network Convergence System (NCS) allowed for this traffic to flow without any delay.
“The complexity of the game means the tech needs to work,” says Adametz. “It’s very latency-sensitive. High-ping affects the game. And so many things could’ve gone wrong.”
But they didn’t. And for Cisco, implementing this challenging framework was an exciting opportunity.
“We partnered with Riot because we knew they would push the boundaries,” says Brian Eaton, Director of Global Sponsorships at Cisco. “That’s what we want. It starts with a ‘what-if’ and it challenges us to keep up. And for us, we’re enabling their growth.”
“Esports players,” says Mindy Warner, Marketing Manager at Cisco, “understand what a millisecond feels like. So it was good to prove it out. And given the amount of data, with zero errors, zero pauses, all when we were remote, that we did this is really cool. We’re a creative team. If you give us a challenge, we pull in the right people and get it done.”
Cisco and Riot will be back at it again for the 2020 All-Star Event, held Dec. 18–20. It will be the first time that a competitive esports competition will be played on the latest Cisco’s servers, in this case Cisco UCS. “Our team spec’d processors with extremely high clock speeds for our next generation of competitive game servers,” says Adametz. “Combined with the fastest enterprise memory available we should achieve very low latency and support the highest-tier professional gameplay. That’s what sets apart these servers and it’s only the beginning. And it wouldn’t happen without Cisco.”
Both Cisco and Riot hope that the impressive nature of this technology will inspire fans to start careers in network computing. Starting at the All-Star event, Cisco and Riot will partner in connecting tech-savvy LoL Esports fans with the myriad of free courses and certifications that Cisco offers for students and early-career adults.
“This audience is hungry to learn about becoming certified engineers supporting the systems and networks that power their favorite games,” says Warner. “We’re using esports to let people know that you can be an engineer in your passion area. And we’re here to help you get certified. We’re excited to grow this initiative together with Riot.”
"Since we announced the tech partnership between Cisco and League there has been an outpouring of questions from players and fans on how they can get involved and even pursue a career in gaming and esports,” Adametz added. “We're happy to share in an initiative to offer training and educational resources to encourage more esports fans to marry their passion for games with a lucrative career."
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